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Online Sources for Financial and Economic Market Data

Article Quant Q&A · Author: John Smith

Summary

This document compiles online sources for economic and financial data across asset classes. It groups providers and repositories by topic, including macroeconomic statistics, foreign exchange, equities, fixed income, options, futures, commodities, and multi-asset data. The entries range from official statistical agencies and academic datasets to commercial vendors, with notes on coverage, history, formats, access methods, and whether access is free, delayed, or paid.

The list also includes user reports about data reliability, availability, and changing services. One contributor cautions that historical prices from general-purpose portals may be ambiguous or misleading for research, so users should check how prices are adjusted and what they represent. The compilation is a community-maintained directory rather than an evaluation or guarantee of current service quality; some listings may be outdated, and data coverage, cost, licensing, and availability should be confirmed with each provider before use.

Key ideas

  • Online data sources cover economic indicators and many financial asset classes.
  • Sources range from public agencies and academic repositories to commercial data vendors.
  • Providers differ in history, instrument coverage, update speed, formats, and cost.
  • Historical price definitions and adjustments can affect research conclusions.
  • The community list may be outdated, so verify current access and data terms.

Tags

Full text
# What data sources are available online?


# What data sources are available online?












What sources of financial and economic data are available online? Which ones are free or cheap? What has your experience been like with these data sources?

## Answer by Andy Nguyen (score 275, accepted)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/168

This post is Quant Stack Exchange's master list of data sources.

Please append your links to other data sources to the list below. Note that a source listed under a certain topic may provide extensive data on other types of instruments as well.

### Economic Data

See What are the most useful sources of economics data? on Cross Validated SE.

World

- OECD.StatExtracts includes data and metadata for OECD countries and selected non-member economies.

- http://www.assetmacro.com/ includes data for 20,000+ Macroeconomic and Financial Indicators of 150 countries

- https://db.nomics.world is an open platform with more than 16,000 datasets among 50+ providers.

- https://data.bis.org/ BIS statistics

United Kingdom

- http://www.statistics.gov.uk/

United States

- Federal Reserve Economic Data - FRED (includes URL-based API)

- http://www.census.gov/

- http://www.bls.gov/

- http://www.ssa.gov/

- http://www.treasury.gov/

- http://www.sec.gov/

- http://www.economagic.com/

- http://www.forecasts.org/

### Foreign Exchange

- 1Forge Realtime FX Quotes

- OANDA Historical Exchange Rates

- Dukascopy - Historical FX prices; XML and CSV. There is a non-affiliated downloader called tickstory.

- ForexForums Historical Data - Historical FX downloads via Amazon S3

- FXCM provides an open repository of tick data starting from January 4th 2015, with a download script on github.

- GAIN Capital - Historical FX rates (in ZIP format)

- TrueFX - Historical FX rates (in ZIP/CSV format). A download helper script is available on GitHub. TrueFX.com asks for free registration. Same files are linked from Pepperstone, no registration needed.

- TraderMade - Real Time Forex Data

- [RTFXD - Real Time FX Data] 9: Delivered via ssh. Very low pricing.

- Olsen Data / Olsen Financial Technologies: Historical FX data can be ordered online in custom format. Download link sent in 2 business days. Real time data service. Expensive but very high quality.





- PortaraCQG - Historical Forex Data Supplies FX 1 min, tick and level 1 from 1987. Updates and data tools included.

- Databento Real time and historical data direct from colocation facilities. Integrates with Python, C++ and raw TCP. Includes order book, tick data, and subsampled OHLCV aggregates at 1s, 1min, 1h, daily granularity.

- ForexFeed Real time and historical forex and precious metals data in various data formats through a Data API or a REST API Web Service.

### Equity and Equity Indices

- http://finance.yahoo.com/

- http://www.iasg.com/managed-futures/market-quotes

- http://kumo.swcp.com/stocks/

- Kenneth French Data Library

- http://unicorn.us.com/advdec/

- http://siblisresearch.com/

- Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) - Historic US stock market, investable index and other investing related data. Especially used by academics and subscribed by universities and university libraries in the US.

- usfundamentals.com - Quarterly and annual financial data for US companies for the five years up until 2016

- http://simfin.com/

- Olsen Data / Olsen Financial Technologies

- https://www.tiingo.com/welcome - Equity, ETF, and Mutual Fund price and fundamental data

- Norgate Data - Deep daily history of US, Australian and Canadian equities and indices, survivorship bias-free, and daily updates.

- PortaraCQG - Historical Intraday Data - Supplies global indices 1 min, tick and level 1 from 1987. Updates and data tools included.

- Databento - Real-time and historical data direct from colocation facilities. Integrates with Python, C++ and raw TCP. Includes order book, tick data, and subsampled OHLCV aggregates at 1s, 1min, 1h, daily granularity.

- EquityRT - Historic stock trading, index and detailed fundamental equity (historic and forecast) data and financial analysis along with industry-specific financial analysis and comparisons, institutional shareholding data and news reports provided through Excel APIs or a web browser. Service includes foreign exchange, commodity and cryptocurrency prices in addition to some fixed income, and macroeconomic data. Service was geared towards emerging countries' markets but recently expanded to include developed country markets. Not free but quite reasonably priced.

- Investing.com - Trading and some fundamental data for equities in addition to pricing data for commodities, futures, foreign exchange, fixed income and cryptocurrencies through a web browser. Only pricing data can be downloaded for free. Historic financials and forecasts and financial analysis available for companies with the pro subscription through a browser along with downloading and charting, no APIs.

- algoseek - Non-free provider of intraday and other data through various types of APIs and platforms for equities, ETFs, options, cash forex, futures, and cryptocurrencies mainly for US markets.

- tidyquant - Provides APIs for R to get financial data (historic stock prices, financial statements, corporate action as well as historic economic and FX data) in a “tidy” data frame format from web-based sources.

### Fixed Income



- Barclays Capital Live (institutional clients only)

- CDS spreads

- PortaraCQG - Institutional Supplier - Supplies Tullet Prebon Sovereign Debt 1 min, tick and level 1 from 1987. Updates and data tools included.

- Credit Rating Agency Ratings History Data - Corporate rating histories from multiple agencies converted to CSV format.

- Data on historical, cross-country nominal yield curves - A Q&A on fixed income yield data providing links to official and commercial sources for many different countries.

- Cbonds - Provides data on global financial markets with the main focus being the bond markets.

### Options and Implied Volatility

- http://www.ivolatility.com/

- http://www.optionmetrics.com/

- http://www.historicaloptiondata.com/

- https://www.commodityvol.com/

- https://datamine.cmegroup.com/

- Olsen Data / Olsen Financial Technologies

- Databento - All US equity options, 1.4+ million instruments including single names, ETFs, and indices, e.g. VIX, SPX, SPY, QQQ. Options on futures on CME and ICE.

### Futures

- http://www.simiansavants.com/cmedata.shtml

- http://www.cmegroup.com/market-data/index.html

- http://www.quandl.com

- Olsen Data / Olsen Financial Technologies

- Norgate Data - Deep daily history of 100 futures markets from 11 worldwide exchanges, and daily updates.

- PortaraCQG - Historical Futures Data Supplies Global Futures. Daily from 1899, 1 min, tick and level 1 from 1987. Updates and data tools included.

- Databento . Real-time and historical data direct from colocation facilities. Integrates with Python, C++ and raw TCP. Includes order book, tick data, and subsampled OHLCV aggregates at 1s, 1min, 1h, daily granularity.

### Commodities

- LIFFE Commodity Derivatives - 15 min delay; free registration

- PortaraCQG - Historical Commodities Data Global Commodities including LME, Asian and Russian commodity exchanges.

### Multiple Asset Classes and Miscellaneous

- http://www.eoddata.com/

- Robert Shiller Online Data

- S#.Data is a free application for downloading and storing market data from various sources

### Specific Exchanges

- Spanish Futures & Options (MEFF)

- CBOE Futures Exchange (CFE Vix Futures)

## Answer by Andrey Taptunov (score 21)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/149

I'm only aware about 3 free data sources of which 1 is still working in June 2018: - GAIN Capital. It contains infomation about FX rates only

Below ones are not available anymore:

- EuroNext. Bonds and Equities are available. "Search by Criteria" -> select instrument -> "Data downloads".

- RBS Databank. Interest rates, FX rate, commodities and CPI

## Answer by user697697 (score 21)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/1472

I don't know how interested you are in the CME data, but I have been learning about options and volatility modeling. I have been working with delayed CME data.

I have been able to extract the JSON queries and now have been able to run them in my .NET application to get data for every asset type.

Exmaple of ES options data:

Run the query below in Chrome and you will see the JSON response. In other browsers you will be prompted to download the JSON file.

The link below asks CME server to return back options data for given strikes:

http://www.cmegroup.com/CmeWS/md/MDServer/V1/Venue/G/Exchange/XCME/FOI/OPT/Product/ES?currentTime=1311084303814&contractCDs=,ESU1%20C1315,ESU1%20P1315,ESU1%20C1320,ESU1%20P1320,ESU1%20C1325,ESU1%20P1325,ESU1%20C1330,ESU1%20P1330,ESU1%20C1335,ESU1%20P1335

I have been able to get other data as well by just changing the contract Code.

To parse it you just use the .NET `Serialization` class (add reference to `system.web.extensions` and `using System.Web.Script.Serialization;` on .NET framework 4.0)

## Answer by Jono Newton (score 19)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/1941

Academic access to Thomson Reuters Tick History:

### www.sirca.org.au

The Thomson Reuters Tick History database provides millisecond-timestamped tick data going back to January 1996, covering 45 million OTC and exchange-traded instruments worldwide. The database currently updates at a rate of 1 million messages per second and is around 3 Petabytes uncompressed. It is a comprehensive, accurate and precise historical record of market behaviour. Includes API and MATLAB API access. Contact Sirca for more information.

## Answer by otto (score 16)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/160

> -- (historical) stock prices --

What do you mean by that? Nominal, real, corrected due to monetary-base-change, corrections with Y-other-things? What is your goal?

> I have been able to download (historical) stock prices via yahoo and google.

Alas looking historical data from Google/Yahoo's screeners can be highly misleading and making conclusion based on it very dangerous. Please, note that you cannot always trust the data, sometimes they are nominal or real, and sometimes you won't know the type of data. Google/Yahoo are only third-parties to provide you the historical data.

Commercial Data



- Yahoo's providers here and notice the small writings at the bottom here

Educational and Research Data

- Shiller Data about stock market data

- the huge data collection by Ibbotson, book, inflation, interest rates and such things which you must take into account to do any serious research

- Yale databases (massive work done) here

- Intelligent Asset Allocator -book, by William Bernstein, in the very end has a summary of very good data sources

## Answer by Bastiaan Quast (score 13)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/3504

Somewhat more economic data can be found at e.g.:

- The World Bank

- The United Nations

- The OECD

More financial:

- The IMF

European Union / EFTA / EMU data:

- Eurostat

- European Central Bank (financial)

Data from these sources is all freely available. You can also play with data from many of these sources using the Google Public Data Explorer.

## Answer by Suminda Sirinath S. Dharmasena (score 13)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/7664

To get a consolidated feed of most of the data feeds here use Quandl. This is free for limited amount of requests per day.

## Answer by John Carse (score 10)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/1593

I did a fair amount of searching for a good source of historical data and I came across Norgate Investor Services. They provide the data in MetaStock format. I used the data for analysis in MATLAB via Metastockread. They have data for the US, Australia and Singapore.

## Answer by David Addison (score 9)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/38062

Here's a snippet of a detailed list of data sources and tools which available on my blog at http://the-world-is.com/blog/resources/general-investor-resources/.

Fundamental Financial Data

Institutional:

- CompuStat (S&P Capital IQ) – Compustat offers what I believe to be the highest value instutional-level fundamental financial data. The data standardization methodology is unique and robust (on the order of 1000 pages of business rules). Compustat’s long term competitive edge is cemented by the fact that universities, like UPenn’s Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS), are heavily invested in utilizing the data for research. This, of course, means that finance students (i.e., future financial professionals) are heavily steeped in the pedigree and reliability of this data. Portfolio123 offers cost advantaged access to S&P Capital IQ (CompuStat) data albeit with some limitations.

- Bloomberg (aka, “The Terminal”) – When I was at the Board of Trade, a limited number of Bloomberg Terminals were provided for members to utilize during the day. These machines are incredibly powerful, but also very pricey.

- FactSet – FactSet has, over the years, subsumed many other premium financial data sets, such as Revere Data, which offered very granular corporate revenue data. Investor’s Edge currently receives their core data from FactSet.

- Reuters Fundamentals – Reuters offers a number of applications and APIs to access its company financial. Historically, Portfolio123 used Reuters data before it switched to CompuStat (now S&P Capital IQ). I believe that TradeStation and Interactive Brokers’ IBIS platform still offer API access to Reuters’ fundamentals.

Alternative:

- Quandl – Quandl has long offered stock market and fundamental equities data. Quandl’s move to premium (curated) data sets responds to concerns about data over-proliferation and quality control. In addition, Quandl has begun to offer premium commodities data, including robust and verbose methodologies for querying continuous futures data.

- Damodoran Online – Aswath Damodoran hosts valuable tools, data, and research publications on his site. He teaches at the Stern School of Business at New York University from whence he is regarded as a leading authority on valuation.

- Zacks Data – Now offered on the Quandl API.

- Robur Investment Research – Robur’s premise is that a family investment office curates fundamental financial data, and offers it through a research platform. The distinguishing feature, in my mind, is that the core offering for (rare) global fundamental data effectively replicates powerful capabilities offered by the Big 3 (i.e., Capital IQ, Bloomberg, and Factset) at a fraction of the cost. A caveat: I’m not saying anything specific about any provider, but you usually get what you pay for.

- American Assocation of Individuals Investors (AAII) – Great bargains on fundamental data and a powerful stock screener.

Economic Data

- Quandl - Quandl seeks to democratize (i.e., commoditize?) data. The web platform is pretty basic, but there's a hidden amount of versatility which is unlocked through the web API -- API scripts for querying are available for most quantitative languages. On the downside, Quandl has almost too much data. Founder, Tammer Kamel, has responded by introducing premium data sets. In addition, Quandl offers an API for Economic Data. approved

- Multpl.com - Multpl is a fantastic tool for assessing the market's (i.e., S&P 500's) relative valuation through the cycles. S&P 500 data-sets include: Shiller PE Ratio; price to sales ratio; price to book value; earnings yield; S&P 500 Earnings; and more. approved

- YCharts - YCharts is one of the original financial data aggregators. As it is, vast amounts of data are available from its very simple GUI. Somewhat recently, YCharts incorporated custom variables into toolsets, allowing users to create their financial ratio and time series.

- Trading Economics - Popular site for economic indicators. Offers API access.

- Estimize Economic Indicators - Estimize recently extended its crowd-sourcing platform for economics indicators.

- ShadowStats - "There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics". John Williams has operated this site on "shadow government statistics" for several years. The premise is intriguing. Williams alleges that the US federal government, traditional economists, and the media choose to highlight "mean-reverting" economic statistics. I.e., metrics that media and government promotes are "self-normalizing" and based on "moving goal posts". While cherry-picking the data might not be out-and-out fraud, Williams alleges that canonical economic meausure paint a rosier narrative than what the raw data actually suggests. Williams provides alternative economic data points in order to offset the shortcomings of and provide information which is differentiated from conventional (BLS) data points.

- Yardeni Research - Host to a broad range of market market indicators, research, and indicators.



- Robert Shiller Data Repository - Includes links to: Yale School of Management's Stock Market Confidence Indexes; Shiller Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings (CAPE-10) data; US housing price indices from 1890; long term inflationary and consumption data; and more.

- St. Louis Fed - Essential resource for macro-economic data.

- Federal Reserve Data - Essential data sets on numerous facets of interest.

- Federal Reserve DDP - The same data sets as above with enhanced ability to perform bulk queries.

- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data - Primary source for the often cited and misunderstood US unemployment and inflation indices. Also sources numerous other statistics.

- OECD Stats Library

- OPEC Statistical Data

- World Bank Statistical Data

Again, there are more information sources available at http://the-world-is.com/blog/resources/general-investor-resources/.

There is some overlap with what has already been mentioned here, but there is also quite a bit of unique content.

## Answer by Marko  (score 6)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/462

http://www.mbtrading.com/developersPriceServer.aspx

MBT Quote API was designed for third-party software developers and provides access to the following data feeds:

```
* NASDAQ Market
* New York Stock Exchange - NYSE
* American Stock Exchange - AMEX
* Toronto Stock Exchange - TSX
* INET and ARCA ECN books
* CBOE Options quotes
* CME Futures Quotes
* CBOT Futures quotes
* Foreign Currencies
```

Under development.

## Answer by Contango (score 6)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/1215

www.historicaloptiondata.com for CBOE options data stretching back 10 years (EOD only). They also have an FTP service which allows you to download EOD option data on a daily basis after market close.

## Answer by user508 (score 6)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/1436

Futures and Forex: http://www.tradingblox.com/?page_id=218

Indicies, Forex, Futures: http://pitrading.com/free_market_data.htm

Commodities, Forex, Stocks, Interest Rates, Mutual Funds, Hedge Funds and more: http://www.wikiposit.com

## Answer by Sam (score 6)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/1969

Information on the FOMC Meeting dates can be in the tables of this article and on the FED website but one would need to manually retype the data which takes time and is error prone.

Here's a Python script to parse the meeting dates from the federalreserve.gov page that you linked: pastie.org/2566958. It pulls the dates from the url of the "Minutes" link for each meeting

## Answer by babelproofreader (score 6)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/4509

Miscellaneous data, extending back hundreds of years in some cases, is available from Global Financial Data

## Answer by Jon Grah (score 6)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/14053

The master list already has dukascopy listed for forex historical tick data. Dukas also now has selected CFDs of indices, metal/energy, and individual stocks. The forex data for the majors go back to 1997 or so. It's free, so you get what you pay for. The data that is more recent (last 5 years) has almost 0 gaps on the majors and crosses.

What was also not mentioned was that you need to either use their jForex platform to download the data or you'd have to download the data manually from their website. This could become quite cumbersome. There are two tools that will automate most of this for you:

TickStory StrategyQuant's Tick Data Downloader

With those free tools, you can also export the data into csv format, which can then be used in most charting applications. In the case of metatrader 4, you need to convert the csv into their binary format (.FXT). Birt's free csv2fxt script can help with that. I also used Birt's TDS to get variable spreads with the backtests done in mt4.

## Answer by Ari B. Friedman (score 5)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/1651

General data source:

WRDS

Fixed Income:

Fed historical daily rates

## Answer by fundamentals (score 5)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/2304

Whether you are an institution or individual you if you want to find some data related to finance, you can check out from here:

- http://fundamentals.morningstar.com/

- http://equityapi.morningstar.com/

## Answer by hroptatyr (score 5)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/2385

Mostly (macro-)economic but also stuff from xignite free (as of 2011-11-15): http://datamarket.com

## Answer by bart (score 5)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/8682

I have used both Xignite and FinancialContent for economic data and stock quote data feeds. The plus side of FinancialContent is that they have JavaScript widgets (free with ads or paid with no ads).

Both companies offer JSON, XML and CSV formatted feeds.

## Answer by SoftwareSavant (score 4)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/8879

I have yet to see Bloombergs open API in this thread...

Bloombergs API

This is the link to the actual API on that page.

The second link is the actual link to the latest api

## Answer by HLus (score 4)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/35879

Our startup SimFin, provides both historical and actual data for free, since we couldn't afford the pricey premium solutions back when we were students and wanted to overcome the hegemony of the data market.

To this date, we have 70+ financial ratios, Financial statements (directly sourced from the SEC's XBRL data and up to 10y back; quarterly, H1 and 9M) and stock prices for over 1000+ US equities, including big indices like the S&P 500. All the fundamental financial data is freely available and you can instantly download it as excel.

Also, as far as the financial statements go, we display both the original as well as the standardized statements and make it transparent how we transition from one to the other.

Feel free to check it out under simfin.com and hopefully find what you are looking for.

As for the user experience and the quality of data, you shall assure yourselves of how good you estimate it and gladly provide us with valuable feedback so we can further improve our service with the power of the community.

## Answer by Emil (score 3)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/3976

For the best historical data on options, go to OptionsDatamine. It has options prices, OHLCV, and open interest over two years historical. Graphs and charts are available too.

## Answer by Tal Fishman (score 2)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/1540

Does anyone have any experience with or knowledge of livevol? They are the only source I've found for historical intraday options data, especially including implied volatility and Greeks calculation, and pricing seems not bad. Even the real-time service seems decent, although it is unclear how it could potentially be tied in to an API.

## Answer by gregory (score 2)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/8887

Thinknum.com is a new financial data provider. We have financial time-series data and data for building cashflow models. Thinknum's plotter is similar to tools like GS plottool and JPM data-query in that it allows users to manipulate time-series data using mathematical expressions.

## Answer by Jan Höffler (score 2)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/23268

There is also a related question on the Economics site: https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/4679/what-are-some-good-repositories-for-economic-data

Answers from there: The American Economic Association has a list of resources for economists, including a page for data. There you find links to many institutions that offer all kinds of data, as well as further journals with data archives for the studies they publish.

In the ReplicationWiki (that I work on) we have information on more than 2000 empirical studies, and you can search for which one what kind of data, software, and methods were used, if the material is available, and if replications are known. Many studies can be browsed by JEL codes or keywords. The categorization of data sources and geographical origin of data remains very incomplete but it is a wiki, so everyone can contribute and make suggestions.

## Answer by Stanislav Berkov (score 2)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/24793

CQG Inc. https://www.cqgdatafactory.com/ - historical bar and time sales data (ticks) https://develop.cqg.com/qd/?page=ContinuumDocumentation - api for getting realtime, historical data and trade routing.

## Answer by Tom Wong (score 2)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/61220

EDIT: Hi, I'm incredibly sorry. I'm archiving tendollardata.com and chartsonlygoup.com (link), as of April 1, 2021. All data will only be up to December 31, 2020. I feel compelled to be on a new mission now (link). All orders should have been refunded already. Quant StackExchange is the only place I've advertised my sites.

There are many data services out there, but one worth using is mine: https://tendollardata.com.

(earnings, daily price & market cap, minute/intraday data, financial statements, 13Fs)

I made my site specifically for those exploring finance/markets (not professionals). Those who want to do ad hoc analyses, to answer specific questions, etc. It's all cheap, one-time purchase dataset downloads with 4 months free update (with really generous support policy). You can view the data in-use at chartsonlygoup.com, e.g. chartsonlygoup.com/aapl.

Anyways, this is a new venture. Made with the understanding that all the financial data out there is free, but the belief that most solutions are awful (expensive, inconsistent APIs, subscription-based) and people are willing to pay for convenience + peace-of-mind.

## Answer by Judo (score 1)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/49215

Quandl is free for end-of-data data and of very high quality, but intraday is for paid subscribers only. For one-off downloads, you can try Firstratedata which has tick and 1-minute bars going back 20 years.

TickData.com has the highest quality tick-by-tick intraday data but is very expensive and needs to be purchased separately for each ticker symbol.

## Answer by Ali Khosro (score 0)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/39941

For free financial fundamental data, you can use https://invisement.com

It is a collection of csv file. You can view them online, download, fetch with google sheets or excel or programming languages (R, Python, JS, ...) or embed in your web-page.

It offers SEC data and standardized data.

- https://data.invisement.com?q/AAPL.csv an example to view data

- https://data.investment.com/q/AAPL.csv an example to download.

This is their web-page that explains what data they have:

- https://invisement.com

Shown in full with attribution under the source's licence. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (Stack Exchange)

This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.